Intel’s Linux Software Optimizations Still Pay Off For Xeon 6700E “Sierra Forest” E-Core CPUs.
When testing Intel’s aggressive software Linux optimizations shipped by way of their in-house Clear Linux distribution, I am most often testing it on their high core count Xeon processors with AVX-512… Over the years in dozens of Phoronix articles there have been countless metrics showing off the out-of-the-box performance benefits from leveraging software built for higher x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels, employing compiler-based function multi-versioning, and the other extensive performance tuning carried out by Intel software engineers. But now with the Intel Xeon 6700E “Sierra Forest” series now being available for these all-E-core server processors, I was curious about quantifying the Clear Linux benefits over the likes of Ubuntu Linux. Here are those benchmarks for those curious about the difference.
Intel’s Clear Linux platform is extensively tuned for AVX-512 and other modern CPU ISA features, but thanks to the likes of GCC FMV and x86_64 micro-architecture feature level handling by Glibc, AVX-512 isn’t mandated. In fact, Clear Linux continues to advertise support for Intel Core 2nd Gen and newer, Intel Atom CPUs, and Intel Xeon E3 / E5 / E7 processor support. SSE 4.2, SSSE3, and PCLMUL are among their baseline requirements. But still I was wondering about the performance benefits to the E-core-based Intel Xeon 6700E Sierra Forest platforms with Clear Linux relative to the more common Ubuntu Linux. Plus I also tossed in Arch Linux as another popular rolling-released based Linux operating system.
